Shabazz! I’ve decided to designate the first day of each new week as “Mailbag Mondays” — the day I reach into my digital postbox and address a randomly-picked comment. (By “random,” I mean intentionally chosen for strongest audience appeal.)

I fished today’s comment out of the “Spam” folder – which I’m beginning to realize is WordPress’s way of shielding me from any negative feedback. But I say any publicity is good publicity. So without further adoodley-do:

The comment is in response to my August 10 post “Dumbroll, Please.” Said reader writes:

“Honestly, if you had received those “clever” emails from a guy, would YOU have responded? They don’t sound real enough to bother. They sound like a chat bot wrote them. …They are not stupid enough to answer!”

There’s a lot going on here so I’m just going to dive right into the main argument of – “Would you have responded?”

My “Honest” answer: ABSO-FRUITLY!, and without question. Have you not read my blog? Any guy that is going to nab my attention is going to do so via his sense of humor.

WORDPLAY is my FOREPLAY! Commuter folding bikes and puns do to me what sports cars and rippling biceps do to the Jersey Shore girls. You show me your glue gun and backlog of Tiger Beat magazines and I’ll show you mine. You stimulate my brain, and you stimulate everything else.

Across the board, the guys who have won me over in their emails fit into this “clever” category, with several of them actually evolving from digital pen pals to dating partners. One guy — who I believe to this day is the secret love child of Macgyver and Martha Stewart — emailed a miniature box likeness of me constructed out of cardboard paper and pipe cleaners.

On our third date, we made a small army of these 3-dimensional figurines and went around town, leaving them on random door steps with sweet messages like, “You put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop”  — AND — “Work your cares away, down at Fraggle Rock!”

Another guy introduced me to the strange and fantastic craze of Mexican Pointy Shoes:

He and I spent a full week in back-and-forth emails brainstorming everyday activities confounded by said shoes. Partial list reprinted here:

Playing hacky sack, running a 3-legged race, playing the piano, pole-vaulting, bobbing for apples, walking on stilts, decorating the top of an Xmas tree, trying to slide down the chimney as Santa, scuba diving with flippers, playing hide and seek, using an airplane bathroom, walking a tight rope, lying inside a magic saw-in-half box, rowing a boat, walking up a mall escalator, trying to get off a moving sidewalk, being buried in sand on the beach,  blowing up a balloon, climbing a tree, mounting a horse…

So the answer is YES! I would respond to those kinds of “clever” emails.  I have responded to those kinds of “clever” emails. And I will continue to respond to them.

An important CAVEAT:  There is a very fine line between charmingly corny and criminally creepy. I have received my fair share of match.com messages that motivated me to foster a Rottweiler and take up Krav Maga. 2 particular examples:

• “Hey gorgeous. I’m in town for the weekend from New York. Staying at the W Hotel. Come by and lets listen to the Cure in my hotel, room 343.”